A £1.2 million fundraising bid has been launched by Cambridge and Oxford universities to keep 1,000 years of Jewish history in the public domain.

The Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection of more than 1,700 fragments of ancient Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts has been housed at Westminster College, a Cambridge theological college, since 1896.

But the manuscripts – dating from the 9th to the 19th century – are in danger of being sold into private collections unless the universities can gather the funds to buy them.

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This is news to me. They have already raised half a million pounds, which is great, but there's lots more to go. If you, dear reader, are, or if one of your friends is, a rich philanthrophist, here's your chance!

OBSCURE HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: Dead Sea Scrolls anchor interfaith series. Unpacked, it tells us that Larry Schiffman and James VanderKam will be doing a joint lecture series on the Dead Sea Scrolls in New Jersey later this month.

Wednesday, February 06, 2013

ADAM MCCOLLUM: Cataloging grants. "The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) announces grants available for cataloging work in its eastern Christian collections in Arabic/Garšūnī, Armenian, Old Church Slavonic, and Syriac. ..."

With ancient hype billing it as “the ornament of all Galilee” (the Jewish historian Josephus), and “perched on a mountain like a bird” – i.e., a bird’s eye view (the Talmud) and “a land flowing with milk and honey for 16 miles around,” (ditto) even in ruin, the city of Zippori has a lot to live up to. And it does.

Tuesday, February 05, 2013

By the time you read this, the Cincinnati Museum Center should have completed the mid-exhibit changeover of the 10 ancient Dead Sea Scroll artifacts on display as the centerpiece of its current exhibit.

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The [new] set includes Deuteronomy, Psalms, Isaiah Commentary, Book of War, Aramaic Levi, Pseudo-Ezekiel, Apocryphal Lamentations, Papyrus Bar, Community Rule and Leviticus/Numbers.

In fact, Timbuktu’s residents and preservationists had told TIME early last year that they had rescued tens of thousands of manuscripts before the militants seized northern Mali. They agreed to talk on the condition that TIME kept their secret until the jihadists had been defeated. The operation was conducted by Timbuktu’s old families, which have looked after the city’s 300,000 or so ancient documents for centuries. The residents left behind just a few hundred manuscripts in Timbuktu’s only publicly run collection, the Ahmed Baba Institute, in order to conceal the fact that they’d hidden the bulk of them elsewhere; it was those that were destroyed last month. “The vast majority of belligerents are illiterate, and we don’t want them to know how valuable these are,” Stephanie Diakité, an American in Bamako who runs workshops on the manuscripts, told me before the French and African forces freed Timbuktu. “We want them to think that they are just silly books.”

Now that impression is gone forever. Even those jihadists who are illiterate are likely aware of the manuscripts’ high value, given the headline news generated by their potential destruction. Timbuktu’s libraries comprise one the most detailed written accounts of Africa, from when the city was a gold- and salt-trading hub in the 15th and 16th centuries with a thriving community of scholars and several universities. When TIME visited Timbuktu in 2009 to describe the manuscripts, residents explained that each family appointed one of their children to look after the documents for the next generation — a system that has lasted through countless migrations, invasions and skirmishes over the years.

But with the manuscript pages brittle — they can crumble at the lightest touch — preserving them has become urgent. ...

It appears from the latter article that most of the 2000 unaccounted-for manuscripts were locked safely in a basement room in the Ahmed Baba Institute and were not harmed, which is good news. Also, it is not clear to me whether the Institute building was burned or not. This article indicates that it was at least set on fire, but apparently it did not burn down.

Although most audiences probably know Moontbot from its Oscar-winning film or from Joyce's award-winning children's books, "Golem" is entirely in in keeping with the studio's expressed goal of telling stories through whatever medium works best.

"At Moonbot, we've been trying to find different ways to tell stories because that's what we love to do," Joyce said. "And games seem to be a place that had a lot of potential for narrative, and not just for fun or blowing stuff up. And we saw that, as storytelling evolves -- and it is, the way we get stories, the way we see stories -- that gaming is maybe one of the most exciting places to tell a story."

This particular story -- with its ancient origins -- was so appealing because, among other reasons, it holds great potential for both great action and great emotion, Joyce said. "(It is based on) the ancient folktale of the Golem, the invincible man of clay made in Prague to save Prague from the invading hordes," he said. "There's all kinds of different versions of what the Golem did. And they treat this story as truth. ... It has an ancient pedigree in storytelling. It sort of the first monster movie. "

The residents of Timbuktu suffered grievously under Islamic militant rule. Almost all of life’s pleasures, even the seemingly innocent ones like listening to music and dancing, were forbidden. With the arrival of French and Malian troops here on Jan. 28, life is slowly returning to normal.

But the city’s rich historical patrimony suffered terrible losses. Timbuktu is known as the City of 333 Saints, a reference to the Sufi preachers and scholars who are venerated by Muslims here. The Islamic rebels destroyed several earthen tombs of those saints, claiming such shrines were forbidden.

During their hasty departure from the city last weekend, the fighters struck another parting blow, setting fire to dozens of ancient manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute, the city’s biggest and most important library.

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It turned out the worries were not unwarranted. In the chaotic final days of the Islamist occupation, all that changed. A group of militants stormed the library as they were fleeing and set fire to whatever they could find.

Fortunately, they got their hands on only a tiny portion of the library’s collection.

“They managed to find less than 5 percent,” he said. “Thank God they were not able to find anything else.”

None of the city’s libraries are in a hurry to return their collections from their hiding places, even though Timbuktu is back under government control.

These pictures show the scorched remains of priceless historical documents torched by Islamist fighters before they fled French troops as they closed in on Timbuktu.

The extremists set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless historic manuscripts as they fled French and Malian forces.

Without firing a shot, 1,000 French soldiers backed by 200 Malian troops descended on the ancient desert trading post, as they tried to cut off the escape of al Qaeda-linked fighters.

But before they could be rounded up, the rebels scattered into the desert, torching homes, mosques and libraries, including parts of the city's £16-million Ahmed Baba Institute, home to some 20,000 ancient documents on culture, science and geography, as they left.

Rabbi Eliezer, in his purple robe and flowing gray beard, curls his fists in concentration as he miraculously reverses the direction of a river’s flowing, cerulean water. A paper-cut Moses looks on in surprise as Rabbi Akiva teaches his many students, all colored in yellows and pastels. Rabban Gamliel, sporting a bow tie and monocle, shakes his jowls and wields his gavel as he publicly shames a thin and meek Rabbi Yehoshua.

The Talmud has never looked so good.

Last August, a group of young Jewish artists gathered at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum to write, record, and animate the short films from which these scenes are taken. Over the course of one intensive week, the participating animators and storytellers, many of whom were encountering the Talmud for the first time, brought to life six of the Babylonian Talmud’s best-known tales. Organized by G-dcast, the Jewish nonprofit production company best known for its animations of the Bible, this new initiative, called Studio G-dcast, is out to change the way American Jews approach the Talmud.